It's like the story of the guy in a bar who can't keep from staring
at the two guys at the other end , one of whom looks exactly like
Hitler. Who notices, and says: "You're wondering if I'm really
Hitler. I can assure you I am--the man who murdered the Jews and the
Gypsies and the 24 acrobats," And man number 1 says: "The 24
acrobats?" At which point Hitler turns to his friend and says: "It's
like I told you--nobody cares about the Jews."
At 01:08 PM 3/15/2010, you wrote:
>Bob, one thing that has always interested me is HOW IMPORTANT (AS PERCEIVED)
>the consumer of the poem is.
>
>This is where trouble begins, as the fights break out.
>
>One perceives oneself in a given way that is not shared by others, and the
>poem becomes a vehicle (an instrument) for addressing the dispute. All of a
>sudden "What happened to the poem?"
>
>:)
>Sheil
>
>
>On Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 10:15 AM, Bob Grumman <[log in to unmask]>wrote:
>
> > Gerald Schwartz wrote:
> >
> >> Can there be truly objective criteria for judging a poem?
> >>
> >> G. E. Schwartz
> >>
> >> I'm supposed to be away from my computer by now but got delayed by a
> > touch of some virus (at least, that's all I hope it is). So I'm still at
> > home able to argue (alas). My response: there's no way to be truly
> > objective about anything, but there are ways to be reasonably close to it.
> > Instead of going into how one can do this, because of my excuse
> (my virus),
> > I'm going to skip to a prediction of mine:
> >
> > It will eventually be possible objectively to evaluate the amount of
> > pleasure a given poem gives a given subject at a given time via
> > neurophysiological readings. (I consider a priori that pleasure, finally,
> > is all we're after--in poetry and everything else.) So, a reasonably
> > objective evaluation of that poem for that person would be the average of a
> > number of readings, and a reasonably objective evaluation of the poem for
> > everyone, the average of such readings for everyone who experiences the
> > poem. Forever.
> >
> > I'm speaking of the consumer value of the poem. That's not all that
> > counts, for me. I've long yammered that a bad poem can still be an
> > /important /poem if it provides poets with some new tool of value. So, a
> > poem can be extremely effective, as many of Robert Frost's are, for me, but
> > not important because they don't do anything of consequence particularly
> > well. Ditto for all of Shakespeare's poetry (I consider his plays drama,
> > not poetry). Pound's /Cantos/, as a whole, is not an effective poem but a
> > highly important one--again, for me. Some of E. E. Cummings's poems are
> > both effective and important.
> >
> > To judge the importance of a poem would involve determining what other
> > poems used the tool it was the first to use, of first to use well, and how
> > good they were.
> >
> > In any case, there are certainly degrees of objectivity--e.g., judging a
> > poem a good one because one's grandfather wrote it is clearly
> less objective
> > than judging a poem a good one because it contains fresh metaphors about a
> > subject a consensus of intelligent. informed observers rates as important.
> >
> > I'm now going back to bed.
> >
> > --Bob
> >
Announcing The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry (University
of California Press).
http://go.ucpress.edu/WholeIsland
"Not since the 1982 publication of Paul Auster's Random House Book of
Twentieth Century French Poetry has a bilingual anthology so
effectively broadened the sense of poetic terrain outside the United
States and also created a superb collection of foreign poems in
English. There is nothing else like it." John Palattella in The
Nation
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